Stay classy, Dawgnation.

Jesus, people, how many times do I have to say this?  It’s one kid in one recruiting class.  It’s not the end of the world.  And it’s sure not big enough to make asses out of yourselves.

Tough on crime

Meet Georgia’s latest entry in the Fulmer Cup sweepstakes:

Georgia reserve tight end Ty Flournoy-Smith was arrested Friday night on a misdemeanor charge of filing a false report of a crime.

University of Georgia police chief Jimmy Williamson said that Flournoy-Smith filed a police report with UGA in the last few days about stolen textbooks.

“He went through this whole story of his books being stolen,” Williamson said. “We started looking into it and it was determined that the books were not stolen. He had taken his own books down to a local book buying company and sold them back to them.”

Kid screwed up. The good news is that no scooters were involved.

The bad news is that Jimmy Williamson will always be Jimmy Williamson.

“As long as I’ve ever worked for the University of Georgia police, if somebody files a report of any crime and we designate resources to look into it and we conclude that these people knowingly falsely filed a report then we’ll prosecute, we’ll take out a warrant for filing a false report,” Williamson said.

Bad.  Ass.

I figure we’re about one step away from this scene.

If compiling coaches hot seat lists is right, then I wanna be wrong.

I know he meant well, but all cocknfire’s exercise here did was to remind me of how worthless all these coaches hot seat lists really are.

First, unless it’s based on data coming directly from the decision maker(s), a hot seat list is little more than meaningless speculation.  After the ’97 season, Jim Donnan got an under the table raise from Michael Adams; by 2000, he was gone, because Adams was unhappy about a three-game losing streak to Georgia Tech, despite the fact that Donnan kept winning at least eight times a season.  Who saw that coming?  (I’m not even sure Adams did until the very end.)

Second, sometimes there’s more to an evaluation of a coach’s longevity than wins and losses.  The perceived heat on Mark Richt after his two bad seasons was likely mitigated by the football program’s continued financial success.

Third, at its heart, the whole hot seat thing is too damned arbitrary to be useful.  It’s not exactly hard to come up with a standard that could make any coach come up short.  Could anybody in the SEC survive an Edwin Edwards test?  What coach could get away with shooting a man in Reno just to watch him die?  (Well, maybe Saban, if he did it to ease an oversigning logjam… ah, probably not.)  I keed, but the point is, in a conference where a coach got fired two seasons after winning a national title, there’s always something freakish that could happen at any given time.  So why bother worrying about it?  Best keep this stuff where it belongs, in a Bleacher Report slide show.

Last season’s big story

Weiszer:

In an area that looks at the SEC and the rivalry against Florida, I couldn’t help but notice these facts about the Georgia-Florida series highlighted: “Georgia has won its last two games against Florida,” and “UGA leads the rivalry with 49 wins, 40 losses 2 ties.”

Who would have thought, given the history the last couple of decades in the series, that Georgia could now put the rivalry back in a good light for the Bulldogs?

This, more than anything else, is why I can’t understand how anyone who claims to be a Georgia fan can be disappointed by last season.

It’s Nick Saban’s world and Mack Brown’s just living in it.

So what does it say when the guy running the richest football program in the land admits he’s not keeping up with Alabama?

Man with a plan

Interesting quote from Richt explaining the rationale behind this year’s decision to sign a higher number of JUCO recruits than usual (more junior college players for 2013 than the last four recruiting classes combined):

“If you remember, we had some guys from the ‘Dream Team’ class that, you know, some DBs that ended up not being with us anymore. So those are guys that would’ve been ready to step into the role (as a starter next year with) a little bit more maturity. Since we had a void in that area, we wanted to make sure we brought in some guys that were a little bit older and a little bit more mature in their ability to play the game. But the other thing we knew is that we were going to try to sign a very large class. And the goal was to break up the class. [Emphasis added.] We didn’t want every single guy to be a freshman. We wanted to break it up a little bit, where it we’d have enough junior college guys that would be two years old older than the other guys in the class.

“The other thing that really came out really well for us was the midyear enrollees. Having 13 come in (and enroll in January) was tremendous for us. All of those guys seem to be doing extremely well. And that broke up our big class as well. We have 13 guys now, and we’re indoctrinating them the Georgia way academically and physically — and they’re getting a head start on football, of course.

“So now that rest of the class is going to be closer to 20, instead of 32 or 33 rolling in all at one time. We’ve got it broken up because of the number of midyear players, which I think is working out very well for us so far.”

That’s pretty well thought out… and it seems to have had its origin in the Nick Marshall dismissal.  I’d like to think that if he was that thoughtful about the overall strategy for the class, he was just as careful in terms of deciding who would receive the offers.  Time will tell, of course, but what I see here looks promising.

The hardest job in college athletics

Georgia Tech employs someone whose title is associate athletic director for sales and fan experience.

“Four tickets, four hot dogs and four cokes” will only take you so far.

The perfect replacement

John Infante’s not predicting the imminent demise of Mark Emmert’s NCAA presidency.  He’s just sayin’.

If it should happen, though, whoever succeeds Emmert at the helm needs to be somebody who’s both feared and respected, who has plenty of experience running a college sports bureaucracy and who knows the NCAA rulebook like the back of his hand.

But I don’t think Nick Saban has time for the NCAA’s shit.

What, no vomiting?

#DawgNation In case you're wondering what we do this time of year, here's a little taste of our offseason program. http://t.co/ococ7ekYDK

— Mark Richt (@MarkRicht) February 21, 2013

I just want to see how the kid with the major league Afro at the :51 mark gets his helmet on.

Keepin’ up with the Saban, Plains edition

Looks like the bet-hedging proceeds:

McGee played at Auburn MT JoelAEricksonAU: Auburn has hired Columbus-Carver coach Dell McGee in an off-the-field position, McGee confirmed

— Marc Weiszer (@marcweiszer) February 21, 2013

I wonder if Auburn is one of the schools that’s told McGarity they’ve got his back in overturning the new NCAA recruiting rules.

More to come, no doubt.